My Revolution of PARTs

WASHINGTON: A chunk of a SpaceX rocket that blasted off seven years ago and was abandoned in space after completing its mission will crash into the Moon in March, experts say. The rocket was deployed in 2015 to put into orbit a NASA satellite called the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR). Since then, the second stage of the rocket, or booster, has been floating in what mathematicians call a chaotic orbit, astronomer Bill Gray told AFP Wednesday. It was Gray who calculated the space junk's new collision course with the Moon. The booster passed quite close to the Moon in January in a rendezvous that altered its orbit, said Gray. He is behind Project Pluto, software that allows for calculating the trajectory of asteroids and other objects in space and is used in NASA-financed space observation programs. A week after the rocket stage whizzed close to the Moon, Gray observed it again and concluded it would crash into the Moon's dark side on March 4 at more than 5,500 ...

SYDNEY: Australian researchers have discovered a strange spinning object in the Milky Way they say is unlike anything astronomers have ever seen. The object, first spotted by a university student working on his undergraduate thesis, releases a huge burst of radio energy three times every hour. The pulse comes "every 18.18 minutes, like clockwork," said astrophysicist Natasha Hurley-Walker, who led the investigation after the student's discovery, using a telescope in the Western Australian outback known as the Murchison Widefield Array. While there are other objects in the universe that switch on and off such as pulsars Hurley-Walker said 18.18 minutes is a frequency that has never been observed before. Finding this object was "kind of spooky for an astronomer," she said, "because there's nothing known in the sky that does that." The research team is now working to understand what they have found. Trawling back through years of data, they ...